WHEN fire engulfed China's tallest pagoda, an artist with a background in using copper and its alloy bronze found a new creative medium to work in. Xu Wenwen meets the man whose works with metals grace famous buildings and his very own museum in Hangzhou.

Melted copper takes on a variety of forms: some are individual sculptures, some are framed like paintings, some are flaring as if they are flowing magma, some are sturdy as rocks, and some are covered by a glossy patina.

These works are melted bronze art. An art form born from a blaze in 2006, when the lower levels of the Tianning Pagoda, the country's tallest pagoda located in Changzhou, Jiangsu Province, caught fire.

"Melted copper flowing on the ground was found to be making extraordinary shapes," recalls the inventor of melted bronze art and China's master of copper sculpture and carving, Zhu Bingren.

"I kept some residual pieces, and later on I studied the methodology of how to control and shape the melted copper and make them into artistic works," he adds.

The fire-damaged Tianning Pagoda was later restored, while Zhu's mastery of melting bronze was taken to an unprecedented artistic level, making him an icon of the bronze art industry both domestically and around the world.

Zhu's most satisfactory work of melted bronze art is "Que Li," a painting-like sculpture depicting a lotus leaf.

"This is like a Chinese copper-coated painting," he says, explaining that it combines bronze sculpture, calligraphy, seal engraving and oil painting in the space of half a square meter.

The piece is currently held in the National Museum of China in Beijing.

The complicated combination of artistic styles derives from the bronze artist's profound cultural background - he is also a calligrapher and painter, plus he writes intricate articles and poems, and has taught himself architecture, chemistry, religious culture, landscape design and business management.

Before he invented melted bronze art, Zhu, who has been known as the "king of China copper carving, had been involved in the architecture of more than 20 bronze structures including Leifeng Pagoda in Hangzhou, Mahavira Hall of E'mei Jinding (Golden Top) in Sichuan Province and Guilin Copper Pagoda in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.

And the Bronze Hall of Hangzhou Lingyin Temple he was responsible for is recorded in the Guinness World Records as the biggest copper construction in the world.

As a result of his groundbreaking contribution to copper art, Zhu's bronze sculpture techniques were added to China's National Intangible Cultural Heritage List in 2009.

The 67-year-old Zhu was born in Shaoxing, Zhejiang Province, and moved to Hangzhou during his childhood.

As the fourth generation of a bronze craftsmen family, Zhu's exquisite skills were passed down from his ancestors.

"I grew up in the environment, and I have special passion for bronze," Zhu says. "I've compared bronze to other metals and found bronze was very worshipful and rational. Chinese people see bronze as a symbol of fortune."

Thousands of years ago, bronze was used to make sacrificial containers in China, and later daily items such as drinking vessels and mirrors. In Zhejiang Province, copperware was part of the dowry in marriage.

Zhu began his copper career in the 1980s, during China's reform and opening-up policy, when his father opened a copper store in Hangzhou.

Creative copper

The store's main trade was making cupreous signage, and business was fairly good. However, Zhu was aware that the signboards were manufactured by simple techniques and had no artistic value, so he was determined to advance the technology.

"Old ways do not work nowadays since people's cultural needs are rising and the social environment is changing," Zhu says.

"I was thinking, bronze is malleable, colorful and easy to combine with other materials, there must be something I can do to extend the art," he adds.

Eventually, the idea of a bronze building occurred to him.

"From China's long history, only four bronze buildings remained in the whole country. Moreover, the technology used to make them was nearly extinct."

So the ambitious artist set himself a goal to revive the lost culture and art.

His opportunity came in 1997 when he was invited to make the copper door of the Great Hall of the People in Beijing to commemorate the return of Hong Kong from British rule.

Coincidentally, the task also involved mounting several calligraphy works by noted Chinese calligrapher Qi Gong.

A bold idea flashed in Zhu's mind - to turn calligraphy on paper to calligraphy on copper and hang them on the copper door.

Zhu had faith in his own abilities since he excelled at forging and casting copper, was familiar with bronze's texture, color and touch, and was a successful calligrapher.

"To move calligraphy on paper to copper can extend the beauty of calligraphy's structure and momentum, and can help calligraphy be shown three dimensionally. In addition, a cupreous background with various textures adds artistic value," says Zhu.

Through innumerable tests in both theory and practice, Zhu finally worked out eight of Qi Gong's calligraphies as 2.5 meters by 1 meter copper calligraphies, which were hung on the bronze door of the Great Hall of the People.

Before he invented melted bronze art, the master broke the color restraints of bronze and yielded unusually brilliant results.

In 2002, Zhu took full charge of rebuilding the Leifeng Pagoda, an ancient pagoda in Hangzhou that collapsed in 1924, to be a bronze building with bronze and copper tiles, pillars, beams and ceilings, all displaying his exquisite craftsmanship and the beauty of the metal he specializes in.

"I didn't want to build a fake antique exactly like the former one; I preferred to make a new exquisite treasure."

However, it was a controversial solution to the reconstruction. Many experts disagreed with Zhu's claims that copper could be applied to buildings. But Zhu proved those were only preconceptions.

He not only applied bronze to buildings but also created a new art - colorized bronze sculpture.

Bronze, typically a yellowish-brown, appears in more than 40 colors with Zhu's efforts.

In the Leifeng Pagoda, tiles made from tungsten bronze are black, beams are russetish, balusters are bronze-red and some bronze carvings are golden.

Today, he runs Zhu Bingren's Bronze Art Museum on Hangzhou's old-fashioned Hefang Street, which is also the country's first museum of bronze art. He has also created 57 national patents relating to bronze, and built and designed more than 20 large copper buildings.

"Every piece of bronze work I have made is a work that I hand to the era, and with it fortune to history," Zhu says.

Zhu Bingren's Bronze Art Museum

Address: 207 Hefang Street

Tel: (0571) 8781-5209

Admission: Free